The four teams remaining within a win of the Super Bowl have a combined five tight ends with ties back to the state of Oklahoma.

Cale Gundy helped recruit a bunch of top-notch tight ends during his two-decade tenure as an OU football assistant. Jermaine Gresham. Joe Jon Finley. James Hanna. Brody Eldridge. Mark Andrews. Grant Calcaterra. Brayden Willis.

But nowadays when talk turns to tight ends, George Kittle and Charlie Kolar will sometimes come up.

“Hey,” people have said to Gundy, “aren’t they from Oklahoma?”

“Yeah,” Gundy has answered sheepishly.

“Aren’t they from Norman, Oklahoma?” people have continued. “Like two miles from your university? And you guys didn’t offer?”

Gundy will answer even more sheepishly that yes, Kittle and Kolar, now the starting tight ends for San Francisco and Baltimore, the top-seeded teams in the NFL Playoffs, were from Norman. Kittle graduated from Norman High in 2012 — his dad, Bruce, was actually on Bob Stoops’ staff as the on-campus recruiting coordinator, of all things — while Kolar graduated in 2017 from Norman North. Two of his teammates and close friends: Drake and Isaac Stoops.

Suffice it to say, the Sooner coaches knew all about Kittle and Kolar.

“You know, we missed on those guys,” Gundy told me the other day with a chuckle. “I’ll be the first one to say people can point the blame at me. I missed.”

“I missed on a lot of guys.”

But Gundy and the Sooners hit a lot, too.

Even though Kittle and Kolar went elsewhere — Kittle to Iowa and Kolar to Iowa State — OU won’t be without representatives at the tight-end position during Sunday’s conference title games. Blake Bell in Kansas City. Brayden Willis in San Francisco. Andrews in Baltimore. 

Five tight ends on three of the four remaining teams in the playoffs have ties to Norman.

“The water in Norman,” Kolar’s mom, Maria, said, “it’s tight-end water.”

Oklahoma is the breadbasket of tight ends.

Historically, the state has cranked out a bunch of great ones. Brandon Pettigrew, Billy Bajema and Blake Jarwin all went to Oklahoma State before playing in the NFL, and Bajama (Westmoore) and Jarwin (Tuttle) were Oklahoma prep products. And before the current crop at OU came the greatest Sooner tight end of them all and one of the best of all time, Keith Jackson.

But talk to college football recruiters who do what Gundy did for many moons, and you’ll hear what a tough position tight end is to recruit. The best at the position are agile, dynamic pass catchers and physical, capable blockers.

“And here’s the reason why (the position is hard to recruit) is, because most of those guys never did that in high school,” Gundy said. “Those guys were always running around, catching the ball, having a good time.

“And then all of a sudden, you ask them to play the real tight end position.”

Projecting whether a recruit is going to be able to do that physically and mentally can be difficult.

Blocking was a struggle for two of OU’s best tight ends in recent years, Gresham and Andrews. Gundy remembers how little Gresham liked contact. He got better at blocking, but the coaches could tell from Gresham’s first step after the snap whether he wanted that contact.

During his NFL career, Gresham continued to improve his blocking, and that’s no easy thing. At the pro level, tight ends block what Gundy calls “the freaks of the freaks, the defensive ends that are 260 pounds and run 4.5s. I think they’re the greatest athletes in all sports.”

“How do you block those guys?” Gundy once asked Gresham.

“You don’t,” Gundy remembers Gresham telling him. “It’s about footwork and getting in their way for about a second and a half. You can’t come off the ball and put your hands on them because these guys are probably going to snap you in half. It’s all about trying to cut a guy off and just hang on for a little bit so that the ball carrier can get past.”

As for Andrews, who the Ravens activated for their 2 p.m. AFC Championship Game against Kansas City, Gundy remembers trying to use him more as a blocker. Because Andrews was big, 6-foot-5, 250-plus pounds during his OU days, he was similar to most college defensive ends. 

One spring, Gundy and Sooner offensive line coach Bill Bedenbaugh convinced then-Sooner head coach Lincoln Riley to let them work Andrews as more of an in-line tight end, more of a blocker.

The first session in spring ball Andrews was used as a blocker, he separated his shoulder.

That was the end of the experiment that year.

But the next spring, Gundy and Bedenbaugh convinced Riley to give it another go.

“The second time he goes down there,” Gundy said of Andrews, “he does it again.”

The second separated shoulder was enough for Riley.

“To hell with that,” Gundy remembers Riley saying. “If I want somebody to block, I’ll put somebody in there, substitute for him. I want him catching passes and running down the field.”

Andrews did a lot of that, rolling up 1,765 career yards and becoming OU’s all-time leader in receiving yards by a tight end, something he achieved in only three seasons.

Now, he’s in the discussion for the best tight end in football.

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Andrews. Kittle. Travis Kelce. That’s the shortlist.

And while OU lays claim to one of those guys, it easily could’ve had two. 

Kittle, who moved to Norman as a sophomore when his dad joined the staff of longtime friend Bob Stoops, was a regular around the Sooner football offices. The coaches liked him. They knew what big numbers he was putting up at Norman High.

But Kittle was more of a receiver than a tight end. A big receiver at 6-foot-4 or so, but still.

“If he was 205 pounds,” Gundy remembered, “he was lucky.”

Kittle was a beanpole, and because he wasn’t quite fast enough to be a receiver in college, his frame scared off lots of recruiters. Coming into Signing Day of his senior year, Kittle only had one scholarship offer from Air Force. But he got a call from Iowa on Signing Day saying that one of their commits had flipped and signed elsewhere. The Hawkeyes suddenly had an available scholarship.

Did Kittle want it?

He jumped at the chance, and the rest is history. 

“We weren’t the only idiots” who didn’t offer a scholarship, Gundy said. “And now, George is as good as any of them.”

Kolar, in only his second professional season, hasn’t reached the upper echelon of NFL tight ends just yet, but he was one of college football’s best for several years. He was twice a finalist for the John Mackey Award, given to the best tight end and won by Andrews in 2017, and finished his college career with 2,181 yards receiving and 23 touchdown catches.

He also won the Campbell Trophy, college football’s academic Heisman.

So, how did a kid who lived so close to OU that he could hear the sound of the football crowd on game days end up at Iowa State?

“I believed in the plan they had and the culture that they were trying to create,” Kolar told me a couple of years ago. “It sounded different than other places.

“Also, no one wanted me, so that made it easy.”

No one might be a bit of a stretch, but OU never offered a scholarship. Neither did OSU, where Kolar’s older brother, John, was a quarterback.

After being injured much of last season, his first in the NFL, Kolar started three of the Ravens’ final five regular-season games and played extensively in their playoff win against the Texans. According to Maria Kolar, one of Kolar’s biggest helpers along the way has been Andrews.

She says the brotherhood of tight ends in the NFL has been an interesting network to see. The position seems to bond all of them together in a unique way.

That bond, Maria Kolar admits, got a bit trippy for the family a few years ago.

Katie Kolar, Charlie’s younger sister, sideswiped a parked pick-up in the Norman North parking lot a few years ago. She was driving the old Pontiac Bonneville that her older brothers had driven, and the impact left noticeable damage on the car. But near as she could see, it hadn’t done much to the big, fancy truck

She left a note anyway on the truck’s windshield.

Not long after, she got a text.

“Hey, Katie, thanks for the note,” her mom remembered the message saying. “So impressed you reached out. Few would. Don’t worry about it. Blake Bell.”

Blake Bell? The Kolars wondered if it might be the same Blake Bell who played quarterback at OU before switching to tight end and starting what has been a long pro career at the position.

The next day, Katie saw one of the football coaches at Norman North.

“Hey,” she asked, “do you have a player on your team named Blake Bell?”

“No,” the coach said with a laugh, “but there was an NFL player lifting here recently named Blake Bell.”

What are the odds? A car that had been driven once upon a time by an NFL tight end hits the truck of another NFL tight end.

“It was a total coincidence,” Maria Kolar said.

But in a state where that position is bountiful, maybe it shouldn’t be all that unexpected.